Slow Website? Find out Why with the Dotcom-Tools Speed Test!

No one likes a slow website. In 2008, this was somewhat acceptable, but in 2018 where most people have blazing fast internet in the palms of their hands, patience has dwindled for slow-loading websites.

Nowadays, most people expect websites to load in under 3 seconds, and there’s a significant amount of research showing that people will bounce or abandon a site very quickly (and not return) when the load time exceeds 3 seconds. In addition to users disliking slow websites, search engines like Google also factor website speed into their ranking algorithms and demote slow sites in the search results. Therefore, having a speedy website is a must!

What Can Be Done About Slow Loading Websites?

Most people know that slow loading websites aren’t good, but they have no idea how to fix them or where to start. This presents a big problem, because most sites that could be fixed by simple optimization sit and remain slow because their owners don’t know where to begin.

According to Web Hosting Buddy, there are a variety of causes for slow-loading websites, such as poor quality web hosting companies, overloaded servers, large images, unoptimized code, DNS issues, and other problems.

Luckly, Dotcom-Monitor offers a free suite of testing tools on Dotcom-Tools.com, including a website speed test that runs from 25+ locations around the world. No other tool like this exists online, and it’s a great resource because it’s completely free to use.

Choose your testing locations, then click “Start Test.” The test will begin running in a round-robin fashion from all of the various datacenters around the world.

View your detailed results by clicking on the page load time. This will generate a waterfall chart where you can see every single element on the page, the size, and how long it took to load.

Analyze the waterfall chart to see where you can make improvements. Large images, long wait time, lack of caching are all areas that can commonly be improved.

Click on the “Summary” and “Performance” tabs to see a breakdown of the best and worst performing elements, including various charts and graphs that help summarize the information.

Finally, click on the “Host” tab to see where externally loaded resources are hosted and the performance of these elements.

Running a speed test with Dotcom-Tools will give you an incredibly accurate picture of why a particular website is slow and how to fix it. This is something that you should consider when looking at improving the performance of any website instead of flying blind. Next time your website is running slow, be a data driven webmaster and use a speed test like the one at Dotcom-Tools.com in order to ensure that your site is running as fast as it should be.